A culture of collaboration

Endowed chair to honor longtime Cancer Center director

When asked to name Dr. John Kersey’s single greatest quality, those who know him well list several: honesty, fairness, and a collaborative spirit.

“John’s legendary skill is listening to what people are interested
in and then pulling them together to work toward a common goal,” says Tucker LeBien, Ph.D.,
deputy director of the University of Minnesota Cancer Center, who has
worked with Kersey for 30 years. “I’ve never witnessed anyone who is as
good at that as he is.”

To honor Kersey’s professional contributions to the field and his
15-year run as director, Cancer Center supporters are partnering with
the University to establish an endowed chair in his honor.

The John H. Kersey Chair in Cancer Research will be fully funded at
$5 million—$2.5 million in donor contributions plus a dollar-for-dollar
match from the University. Longtime Cancer Center proponents Barbara
Forster and Winston and Maxine Wallin have given a total of $500,000 to
kick off the fundraising effort.

“There’s no way you can adequately honor the kind of work John has
done, but this felt like our best attempt at doing that,” says Forster,
who chairs the Cancer Center Community Advisory Board.

“John Kersey played the key role in creating the Comprehensive
Cancer Center that we have today—a marvelous achievement,” adds Winston
Wallin.

A career commitment

Kersey has devoted his entire career to the University of Minnesota.
After graduating from the Medical School in 1964 and completing
residencies in pathology and pediatrics here, he joined the faculty in
1971.

He became director of the University’s Blood and Marrow Transplant Program
in 1974. The following year, he led a team that performed the world’s
first successful bone marrow transplant for treating lymphoma.

Yet despite this and other cancer-related breakthroughs, Kersey
believed something was missing. Cancer research was happening in many
different departments and schools, but the researchers weren’t working
together.

“There was no cohesiveness, no multidisciplinary approach to care or
research,” Kersey says. “We were siloed, and information wasn’t shared
among basic scientists, clinicians, and epidemiologists.”

He believed a cancer center would be an ideal place to bring them
all together. Initially, there wasn’t much support for the idea, says
Kersey, but finally, in 1991, the Board of Regents approved the Cancer
Center. Kersey was named acting director, and after a national search
for a director, “The committee decided I was the lesser of the evils,”
says the ever-modest Kersey, who now holds the Children’s Cancer Research Fund Land-Grant Chair in Pediatric Oncology.

Building a winning team

In the decade that followed, the Masonic Cancer Research Building was constructed—thanks in part to funding from the Minnesota Masons—allowing Kersey to attract more nationally renowned cancer researchers to his team.

The Cancer Center’s first major external recruitment was Stephen Hecht, Ph.D.,
a leading researcher in tobacco-induced cancers, in 1996. “John is such
an open person, so easy to talk to,” says Hecht, who now holds the
Wallin Land-Grant Chair in Cancer Prevention and the American Cancer
Society Research Professorship. “If I hadn’t liked or trusted him, I
don’t think I would have come.”

Kersey also recruited two other top-notch researchers who he says were crucial to the Cancer Center’s success: David Largaespada, Ph.D., who holds the Margaret Harvey Schering Land-Grant Chair in Cancer Genetics, and Douglas Yee, M.D.,
who holds the Tickle Family Land-Grant Chair in Breast Cancer Research
and in March was named the Cancer Center’s new director.

The Cancer Center then applied for an NCI core grant and for
designation as a Comprehensive Cancer Center. Many cancer centers have
struggled for years to get that designation,but LeBien says the
University was “spectacularly successful” on its first try, in 1998.

Today the Cancer Center receives more than $90 million annually in
research funding. And more important, collaborations among its
researchers have resulted in major strides in bone marrow
transplantation as well as in breast, bone, childhood, and
tobacco-related cancers.

“John was really the person who brought all these people together,”
says Hecht. “This is a very collaborative center now, and the director
gets the credit for that.”

Looking ahead

Kersey’s colleagues see the endowed chair as a fitting way to honor
his legacy at the Cancer Center. “It is a permanent way to recognize
John as the founding director,” LeBien says.

As Cancer Center director, Yee will be the first Kersey chair
holder. “It is a real honor for me to take over the Cancer Center from
Dr. Kersey,” Yee says. “He has been both a mentor and a role model to
me. His career has demonstrated the strength of translational
approaches to cancer.

“While Kersey plans to spend more time fishing and playing with his
grandchildren, he’ll also continue his commitment to the Cancer Center
as director emeritus and a childhood leukemia researcher.

“Opportunities still exist to grow and become one of the top cancer
centers in the nation,” Kersey says. “To be a part of the team that is
hoping to remove cancer from the face of the earth is very exciting.”